Cabinet government is dead, in the sense that hip hop is dead, or Elvis. That is, there’s something resembling cabinet government still knocking about, but for all intents and purposes, the cabinet government of the 20th century is dead. This may come as a shock to some people, as it appeared to shock the Guardian, who printed it on their front page yesterday after several former cabinet secretaries gave a damning criticism of the Blair-Brown years and their presidential style of governing.
But to anyone who studied AS level Politics last year, this judgement won’t come as a surprise at all. If anything, they’ll be extremely annoyed that this story wasn’t printed back in May, so that they could have used it as an example in their exam essays. That was definitely the first thing that came to my mind when I read the story yesterday.
In AS level Politics, we learnt all about cabinet government and collective responsibility and the evolution of the Prime Minister from a ‘first among equals’ to the presidential style of governing criticised by the mandarins. We weighed the arguments for and against these different styles, and the general conclusion was that a more collective, cabinet-led style of governing was more democratic, but that the centralisation of power by successive leaders and the concentration of the media on personalities had in effect created a presidential-style Prime Minister.
So why is it that I spent a year learning about this, whilst the people with the power to evoke change sat around and let it happen? A year ago this kind of criticism might developed into some kind of controversy, it might even have warranted a follow up story, with a response from Gordon Brown himself.
Maybe the reason it didn’t cause a stir is because it’s common knowledge that Blair and Brown led/lead their governments in a presidential style, centralising power to the office of the Prime Minister, and that there’s not that much that can be done about it. It’s also inevitable that when Cameron takes the reigns he’s going to continue ruling in the same way Blair and Brown did.
But then, the idea of Gordon Brown being anything like presidential at the moment seems, at best, laughable.
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